How Super Mario Bros. Wonder's devs narrowed down 2000 ideas for its effects

28.03.2024 - 09:15 / eurogamer.net / Shiro Mouri / Takashi Tezuka / Nintendo

It's not often we get to hear a senior developer of a Super Mario Bros. game philosophise about game design. At gamescom last year, Takashi Tezuka, executive officer at Nintendo and producer on Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and Shiro Mouri, the game's director, gave us a glimpse, as they spoke with Eurogamer about their intentions for Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

At the time, Tezuka said «There was a lot of feeling about creating something else, something new,» with Mouri adding that «in terms of the concept for creating a new Mario, we came up with the concept of mystery and secrets».

Much of that was echoed by the pair's talk at GDC last week: Tezuka noted the team's mantra this time was «Big Changes,» while Mouri mentioned the sense of lingering familiarity again, and the desire to evolve things in light of it. Only this time they opened up a little further, offering detail on cut ideas, development approaches and more — but they began with the same point they made to us.

«In the first Super Mario Bros., points came out when you hit blocks, and you grew bigger when you got a Super Mushroom. Everything about it was new, and full of secrets and mysteries. However, as 2D Mario has been played for many years, at some point all of this has become normal,» Mouri said.

«Therefore, on the latest game, I tried making a new version of these secrets and mysteries. I tried making something where if you hit a block, a special item comes out, and if you take this item, you can go to another area. When I showed that to Mr. Tezuka, he said, „This isn't so different to how it's always been. Can't you make this so instead of going to another area, the environment itself changes?“

»So I thought, «Well, if I'm going to change the environment anyway, I might as well go hard.» I made constant changes that have never been seen in a Super Mario Bros. title. I made the Warp Pipes wiggle and the Piranha Plants break out in song. And so, this is how the strange changes that happened — the Wonder Effects in this game — came to be."

Tezuka, meanwhile, opened with a discussion of Super Mario Maker, joking to the audience that while everyone had a «level playing field» in terms of enemies and tools available, «when we played the posted courses — and let's keep this here — some of them were not very good!»

The real lesson, he said, was that while good controls, enemy design, and so on were important, «whether they come alive or fall flat is dependent on the level designer.»

«What goes through my mind when creating a Mario game,» he continued, is that «the presentation of games has evolved over time, as images and sounds can now be produced to look and sound more real. But how has realism in gameplay evolved?» For example, he said, «Does